When the latest Nielsen biopsy revealed that the top-four TV networks lost 6 percent of their steadily shrinking pool of viewers in the last year, network programmers simply shook their heads like cancer victims trying to make sense of it all.
They knew that Dr. Doug Ross, not to mention Conrad Bloom or Maggie Winters, would not be able save them. When the Audit Bureau of Circulation added its voice to the threnody with news that seven of the nation's 10 largest metropolitan dailies suffered circulation drops in the six-month period ending 30 September, a few publishers called meetings to discuss how to better serve the illiterate readers they were failing to reach. But these were half-hearted efforts, consisting mostly of talk about the old glory days, when all it took to reel in thousands of new subscribers was "Dear Abby"> and The Far Side.
At the same time that traditional news and entertainment producers cleave themselves into smaller and smaller, superfluously specialized entities, advertising thrives. In supermarkets, grocery batons that once bore utilitarian instructions ("Please place between orders") for boundary transgressors too dull-witted to intuitively grasp their purpose are now emblazoned with glossy, full-color (albeit constrictingly rectangular) ads for the latest Disney blockbuster. Pool-table felts of demographically desirable barrooms are impregnated with deep dye pitches from megalithic breweries and local tire outlets. Horror comic publishers offer product-placement opportunities to advertisers eager to reach the elusive gore-geek demographic.
In other words, pretty much the only group of consumers that advertisers can't reach now is the one comprised of post-food-junkie teetotalers who have no interest in emetic cartoon vampire-women. And they spend all their money on heroin and crack anyway, so who really cares?
The remarkable reach that advertising now claims, especially compared to the diminishing scope of traditional mass media, is a factor that has as much resonance for artists, authors, and other cultural exhibitionists as it does for advertisers. In short, if you want to be Lucille Ball or Walter Winchell today, where do you send your résumé? To the increasingly squeezed broadsheet or the fading Peacock -- or to Fallon McElligott?
While no single TV show or magazine can aggregate eyeballs in the same way that I Love Lucy or The Saturday Evening Post once did, even the worst commercial, given its capacity for cross-platform saturation deployment, can still reach hundreds of millions of viewers. Which is simply to say, the new Seinfeld, at least until the old Seinfeld stops appropriating other men's wives long enough to film some new American Express commercials ("Don't wreck homes without it!"), is Dinky, the Taco Bell Chihuahua. "We treat the campaign like a sitcom with the dog as the lead character," copywriter Clay Williams explained to The New York Times recently, and after 19 mostly mediocre, but widely seen, episodes, the suspiciously thin Gorditas gourmand is TV's most beloved star.
Fans send him gifts and ask for his autograph (if they could train Kevin Sorbo to fulfill such requests, why not a Chihuahua?). Entrepreneurs peddle a wide variety of Chihuahua-themed merchandise, including plush toys, T-shirts, and clingy, neurotic companions. Williams' work has even inspired the sort of tribute usually reserved for Steven Spielberg and other brand-name auteurs -- a lawsuit alleging that he stole the spokescanine idea from someone else.
Not so long ago, every other copywriter was working on a novel or a screenplay in between detergent campaigns. Such souls, while not extinct, are far rarer now: Why trade in the big paychecks and even bigger audiences for a life of impecunious obscurity? As Spike/DDB and Kevin Williamson's work for Tommy Hilfiger attests, talent-migratory patterns currently move in the opposite direction. And it's not just because the money's better and the audiences are bigger. Advertising now affords greater opportunities for creative risk than traditional forms of entertainment media -- especially TV shows or magazines, which are loathe to feature any content that might offend advertisers.
Consider, for example, the recently cancelled Miller Lite campaign, in which the best ads in the series parodied anti-advertising: At the start of each ad in the campaign's earliest efforts, the transparently ersatz creative superstar Dick foreshadowed the imminent anti-ad doublespeak, but none followed. A naked man navigated a cornfield, a magician's assistant sprouted small rodents under her armpits. There was no sales pitch, implicit or otherwise, and no attempt to create a positive mood that one might then associate with the product; the ads were as random and pointless and tedious as an undergrad film major's senior project. In this regard, they were even more daring than the supposedly subversive ad parodies that run in AdBusters; the latter still operate within the context of traditional hucksterism, trumpeting glib intentionality above all else. But what made the Miller Lite campaign truly compelling, of course, was how much there was at stake each time an ad ran: careers, millions of dollars in beer sales, the coronary health of distributors who felt Fallon McElligot's suspiciously un-American approach was killing their business. What other TV programming or similarly budgeted movie has taken equivalent risks in the last few years?
Examples of advertising artistry are everywhere now. A few weeks ago at HotWired, Suck's saucy sister site, a collaboration between the webzine and Hewlett-Packard made the long-standing metaphor of "brought to you by" sponsorship concrete. Initially the site's frontdoor was rendered in shades of gray; only when you clicked on the Hewlett-Packard banner -- or moused over images on the page -- did color appear. In addition to being an effective, highly interactive ad, it also offered implicit commentary on the whole gray area of advertising-editorial synergy, and how such synergies, which are usually far less visible than they were in that particular partnership, can color editorial integrity.
Similarly, 4,470 Dollars, a work by artist David Maas, will appear in the December issue of Artforum International. The title derives from the amount Maas spent to obtain a full-color page in the magazine; the "ad" is a photo of US$4,470. It's a wonderfully resonant concept, one that vividly suggests the power and purity of advertising as an artistic medium. Indeed, if artists were to seek similar editorial coverage from Artforum, they would undoubtedly end up pitching their work -- perhaps to the point of even altering its content -- in a manner that would appeal most to the magazine's editor. But as advertisers, artists can present their vision to Artforum's audience without compromise. As a growing number of artists look toward advertising as a venue for creative expression, signing ads is becoming an increasingly popular practice. Fifty years ago, a threadbare novelist whose last book didn't sell well may have anonymously applied his talents to the marketing of a new underarm deodorant, but today's adteurs take full credit for their work.
Ironically, most of the signed work done by non-industry types has been relatively lackluster. This is especially true of the Absolut Literature series of ads, to which authors John Irving, Dominick Dunne, Douglas Coupland, and Julia Alvarez have all contributed. While it's true the series has intermittently resurrected the tradition of the two-short-stories-per-issue New Yorker, none of the ads in the series have come close to suggesting the real possibilities of the ad as art; it's as if the participating authors are under the impression that their status as "real writers" means they shouldn't sacrifice their best work, or even something they'd pawn off on a low-paying literary journal, for an ad.
What we'd really like is for the concept of the signed ad to take hold among the industry's true stars: the director of the first Bud Light "I Love You, Man," commercial; the Rockwellian populist who has warmed the hearts of so many with the long-running "Milk Mustache" campaign; the anonymous scribes behind our modern bible, the Pottery Barn catalog. These souls are the true shapers and recorders of our times; they deserve more than just obscure affluence and the recognition of their peers.
